Rhetoric heats up against media in Senegal

In Senegal,
a fiery debate over press freedom has been pitting the independent press against
the government in the aftermath of a brutal beating by police in June of two
sports journalists after a soccer match.

The incident, which came amid a flurry
of threats and violence against independent media, triggered protests actions in Senegal, and recently
in Chicago,
and a news
blackout as well as the formation of a local Committee for the Protection
and Defense of Journalists. In a surprising twist however, authorities have
accused the victims of triggering the incident by assaulting one of the
policemen, a claim ridiculed by journalists. A senior judge is overseeing the
case, but a larger national and international debate about Senegal's state
of press freedom is taking shape.

Thiam listed the names of more than 70
Senegalese journalists deemed "excellent," before describing unnamed rogue
journalists as corrupt, blackmailing, diploma-less, "terrorist" political
militants obsessed with sensationalism, negative character assassination, and
tarnishing the image of the nation. He went as far to compare their journalism
to that of Radio Television des Milles Collines--a station infamous for its role in 1994
genocide in Rwanda.

On Tuesday, Farba Senghor, a government cabinet minister and the
propaganda chief of the ruling Senegalese Democratic Party, declared that the party would
boycott "a certain press" until the end of the year. Senghor, who was never
publicly held accountable for threatening to
"beat up" a journalist in 2007, recently called for an anti-media campaign
in response to a coverage blackout of the party's activities launched by the
independent media.

Some Senegalese independent journalists CPJ spoke to said such
hostile comments toward the media by officials, security forces, and members of
the powerful Mouride Muslim brotherhood were partly fueled by the contemptuous
rhetoric of President Abdoulaye Wade. Once an ally of the press who endured
decades of repression as an opposition leader, Wade has since presided over
more suppression of independent media than his predecessors. Since coming to
office, police interrogation of journalists and, to a lesser extent, raids of
newsrooms over political stories, has become routine. Wade has also reneged his pledges to scrap
criminal libel laws, and frequently threatened to impose regulations on
press cards.

"Read the press in Senegal, they are destructive. They
are not constructive," Wade declared in his most recent interview. Even as a distinguished guest of prominent
American journalists last month, the president could not restrain his
contempt for their Senegalese counterparts.

His fellow party
member Thiam charged in his editorial that 50 percent of the reports of the
Senegalese press are either false or unfounded.
He went on to declare that criticism must be done "responsibly" because it
is counterproductive to national interests of development and breeds "Afro
pessimism." To illustrate this point, he cited an alleged confidence from a
government minister disclosing that a German investor who arrived in Senegal to
build a plant changed his mind after reading a front-page story in a Senegalese
paper reporting that the country was running a deficit.

Authorities frequently challenge the
professionalism of Senegalese independent journalists. While political and
financial pressures undermine the independence of free media allover Africa, Senegal's press corps is among the most vibrant
on the continent and the country is home to the second-best journalism school in Africa,
according to a UNESCO rating.

Meanwhile,
journalists continue to be summoned to the police for political stories. Last
week, police blocked the distribution of private newspaper L'Asand interrogated the editor over an
interview of a judiciary union leader critical of the interior minister,
according to local media reports and local journalists.

Mohamed Keita is advocacy coordinator for CPJ's Africa Program. Keita has written about independent journalism and development in sub-Saharan Africa for publications including The New York Times and Africa Review, and has appeared on NPR, the BBC, Al-Jazeera, and Radio France Internationale. Keita has also given presentations on press freedom at the World Bank, U.S. State Department, and universities. Follow him on Twitter: @africamedia_CPJ.